This is Steven Salzberg's blog on genomics, pseudoscience, medical breakthroughs, higher education, and other topics, including skepticism about unscientific medical practices. Here's where I can say what I really think about abuses and distortions of science, wherever I see them.

Earlier this month, a consortium of 282 clinical trials doctors, in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, threw down the gauntlet against the notion that they should share data. Under the misleading title “Towards fairness in data sharing,” these scientists, who label themselves The International Consortium of Investigators for Fairness in Trial Data Sharing, put forward the breathtakingly arrogant claim that doctors who collect data from patients should control it essentially forever.

I wonder what their patients would think if they knew.

This is the second salvo from NEJM this year. Back in January, the editors of NEJM published an opinion piece that used the derogatory phrase “research parasites” to describe scientists who want to re-analyze data from other scientists’ experiments. This caused an outcry, with many scientists pointing out serious flaws in the editors’ arguments. As I wrote at the time,

“Drazen and Longo [the NEJM editors] are saying, essentially, that only the people who originally collect a data set can truly understand it, and anyone else who wants to take a look is a parasite.”

Keeping scientific data locked away is a recipe for bad science. In the absence of data sharing, flawed results may go unchallenged for years. If someone has distorted or misinterpreted data, we need someone else–someone not invested in proving the same result–to take a second look. This is how science corrects itself.

Even so, at least Drazen and Longo endorsed some data sharing. The authors of this new article (P.J. Devereaux, Gordon Guyatt, Hertzel Gerstein, Stuart Connolly, and Salim Yusuf, all from Ontario’s McMaster University) and their consortium are vehemently opposed to sharing their data with anyone, ever.

Let’s go through their arguments. First, they point out that it takes years of work to set up and run a clinical trial. Absolutely right–no argument there. But then they explain why they conduct these trials:

“A key motivation for investigators to conduct RCTs is the ability to publish not only the primary trial report, but also major secondary articles based on the trial data. The original investigators almost always intend to undertake additional analyses of the data and explore new hypotheses.”

Oh really? This is why they run clinical trials, in order to publish papers? Somehow I doubt that is what they tell the patients as they are asking for informed consent. Not “we want to figure out what is making you sick” or “we want to find a cure”, but “we want to publish a paper, or maybe several papers!” I’m sure that patients would be lining up around the block to join these studies.

Don’t get me wrong: of course the scientists want to publish their findings, and of course they would like to mine the data for more papers, year after year. That’s what some investigators do now. In this world, doctors running clinical trials would never share data. Why would they, when things are working so well for their careers?

But they seem to have forgotten THE motivation for clinical trials: curing disease. I am honestly dumbfounded that Devereaux and his colleagues don’t mention the words “disease” or “illness” in their article, not even once. Instead they focus on “risks” of sharing data, by which they mean the risk that someone else will make a discovery that they didn’t think of, versus the “benefits,” which in their world means either confirming the original study or possibly testing a new hypothesis. They seem oblivious to the notion that re-analyzing the data to contradict the original claims might actually be a benefit to the rest of the world.

Appalling. Did they feel this way when they first went into medical research? Probably not, but somewhere in the competitive struggle to succeed as researchers, they lost their way.

It gets worse. Devereaux and his consortium go on to lay out what they might be willing to consider:

Exclusive use of the data for a minimum of 2 years after the first publication

Another 6 months of exclusivity for every year the trial lasted, up to 5 years of exclusivity

Anyone who wants the data should pay the original investigators “for their efforts and investments in the trial.”

This last point is the most outrageous of all. Hello? Investigators in clinical trials are already paid for their efforts (though the patients are not), often totaling millions of dollars, and often from taxpayers’ money. Now they want to be paid again by each scientist who wants to look at the data?

These guys need to get over it. The reason we fund clinical trials is to cure disease, not to allow Devereaux and company to publish papers. Publication is the means by which we communicate results, but it’s not the reason that anyone pays for the experiments.

Interestingly, in the same issue of NEJM, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren writes about data sharing, expressing quite the opposite view from Devereaux and company. I won’t attempt to summarize her points here, but instead let me quote from one of the public comments published in response to the anti-data-sharing doctors:

“ `This is not working. I just hope that my death will not be in vain and someone learns from it so that others don't have to go through this’ was what my husband said when it became clear that the new drug combination was not working fast enough for us…. My husband died now more than 4 years ago. I have watched his and others' lives been plotted on curves at conferences like ASCO or EMSO and it is deeply upsetting that there are more than 280 researchers who are more concerned about their own careers than the lives of the patients on whom those careers are built. Claiming rights to data paid for with the lives of others has nothing to do with fairness.” Bettina Ryll, M.D., Ph.D., Melanoma Patient Network Europe

I couldn’t say it any better than that. The International Consortium of Investigators for Fairness in Trial Data Sharing–as the 282 investigators called themselves–should be ashamed.

It happens every four years. No, not the Olympics, though of course that happens too. I'm talking about new wackadoodle performance enhancement fads. In the 2008 and 2012 Olympics, it was magic tape, which we saw plastered across the arms and legs of many swimmers. This year it's "cupping," a crude technique that leaves nasty red or purple welts all over your body. Michael Phelps, one of the best male swimmers in Olympic history, featured these lovely welts in photos this week, and you can catch a glimpse of him getting the treatment in the UnderArmour "Rule Yourself" ad featuring Phelps (which is otherwise an excellent ad).

The New York Times, USA Today, and People all ran articles yesterday explaining what those nasty red bruises were all over Phelps' torso and shoulders. USA Today reported, unquestioningly, that athletes use cupping "to relieve tension in their muscles." The NY Times (from which we might expect a bit more skepticism) reported blithely that "Physiologically, cupping is thought to draw blood to the affected area, reducing soreness and speeding healing of overworked muscles." People used the same argument, and then added this bit of illogic:

"given that Phelps took home his 23rd Olympic medal last night, it's tough to argue."

No, it's not. Cupping is ridiculous. There's no scientific or medical evidence that it provides any benefit. The NY Times did express a bit of doubt (though not much), summarizing two small experiments that showed that cupping worked no better than placebo. But the Times couldn't help itself, and went back to quoting anecdotal evidence from true believers.

Rather than review the evidence here, I refer you to a thorough takedown of cupping written last month by Orac, a well-known science blogger who is also a surgeon:

"Among the silliest of alternative medicine therapies is something called cupping.... The suction from cupping breaks capillaries, which is why not infrequently there are bruises left in the shape of the cups afterward."

As Orac points out, repeated cupping in the same spot can destroy your skin and lead to dangerous infections. Another physician, Dr. Harriett Hall, in an article for Slate in 2012, made similar points.

I'm not sure who told Michael Phelps that cupping would help him swim faster, but I am sure that it's terrible advice–definitely not helpful and maybe harmful.

I know athletes are notoriously superstitious, and they get some psychological benefits from the various rituals they use to prepare for competition. There's no harm in believing that magic tape, or a lucky shirt, or always stepping onto the field with your left foot first–or whatever–will help you win. But Michael Phelps and his fellow Olympians should run as fast as possible from unproven treatments (and make no mistake, cupping is one of these) that can only cause them harm.

Humans have been searching for the fountain of youth for millenia, dating back to ancient times. No one has found it yet, so I was very skeptical when I saw the recent announcement from BioViva, a biotech company, of what they called the first successful gene therapy against human aging:

"Elizabeth Parrish, CEO of Bioviva USA Inc., has become the first human being to be successfully rejuvenated by gene therapy, after her own company's experimental therapies reversed 20 years of normal telomere shortening."

That's quite a dramatic claim. If true, this would be a historic breakthrough: no one has ever reversed aging before. While human life expectancy has doubled over the past 150 years, virtually all of this progress has been from preventing early deaths, thanks to the developments of antibiotics, vaccines, and public health advances such as clean water.

Most claims about anti-aging therapies are easily dismissed as pseudoscience, nonsense, or scams. Not this one, though. BioViva has two experimental therapies, both based on legitimate science, and both with at least a chance of working. Neither has yet been proven to work in humans, but both are plausible.

According to BioViva and to interviews with its CEO, Elizabeth Parrish, Parrish received two therapies last year, one to protect against the loss of muscle mass, and one to lengthen her telomeres. The recent announcement claims that the telomere-lengthening therapy is already working, so I looked a bit deeper to understand what might be going on.

First a bit of background: telomeres are special DNA sequences that act as "caps" on both ends of every chromosome, providing a kind of protection for your genes. Each time a cell divides, its telomeres get a little bit shorter, and eventually they get too short and the cell dies. Telomeres therefore act as a kind of molecular clock that tells a cell how old it is. Our cells also have a special enzyme called telomerase that rebuilds telomeres. Cells with lots of telomerase can live much longer, and those without it die more quickly. Discovering how this all worked was a tremendous scientific achievement, for which Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider, and Jack Szostak received the 2009 Nobel Prize.

Scientists have been speculating for years that telomerase might somehow hold the key to aging. BioViva's gene therapy delivers telomerase to the blood with the help of weakened viruses called adeno-associated viruses (AAVs), which they modified to carry the telomerase gene. The virus infects human cells and releases its payload into them, where the "transgene" produces extra telomerase.

This may sound very nice, but it's really, really complicated in practice. Gene therapy can have unexpected negative effects, and no human trials have yet shown that anyone can deliver telomerase effectively to human cells. However, studies in mice have shown some remarkable results: in 2012, a group of scientists at the Spanish National Cancer Centre used AAV to deliver telomerase to mice, and found that it "had remarkable beneficial effects on health and fitness" and that

"telomerase-treated mice, both at 1-year and 2-years of age, had an increase in median lifespan of 24 and 13%, respectively."

This exciting scientific result, and a few others like it, are what led BioViva and Elizabeth Parrish to try the same therapy in humans.

But did it work? Well, this is where things get a bit fuzzy. BioViva claims it did, based on their measurements of the length of telomeres in Parrish's white blood cells in September 2015, before therapy started, and again in March 2016. They claim that her telomeres got longer, from 6.71 kilobases (a kilobase is 1000 DNA letters) to 7.33 kilobases. This increase corresponds to about 20 years of aging: in other words, Parrish's white blood cells "have become biologically younger," as the company reported.

Setting aside the problem that we cannot really conclude anything from an experiment involving only one person, we can still ask: did Parrish's telomeres really get longer? As much as I want to believe BioViva's claim, there are several rather serious problems here. First, the company itself reported that Parrish's telomeres were unusually short for her age before the experiment began. Does this mean that the measurements were simply a bit off, and the second measurements were closer to the true number? Second, as UCLA's Prof. Rita Effros explained in an interview at geneticexperts.org,

"The overarching problem is that peripheral blood contains a mixture of many different cell types with disparate telomere lengths.... Thus, a simple change in the proportion of different cell types within the peripheral blood could easily explain the data."

In other words, it's possible that Parrish's telomeres did not get any longer. Despite the apparently precise numbers, BioViva has not provided any details showing that these measurements are accurate and reproducible (and they didn't respond to my request for these details). Their claim might be much more convincing if they made multiple measurements, both before and after treatment, and if these measurements showed that Parrish's telomere lengths really did increase.

There are a number of red flags about BioViva itself. Parrish herself is not a scientist, though she is an eloquent spokesperson for her company's therapies. More concerning is their Chief Medical Officer, Jason Williams, who previously ran "a dubious stem cell clinic," Precision StemCell (now located in Mexico) that offers stem cell therapies to patients with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease), for which there is no evidence that they work. Personally, I would not trust Dr. Williams with my medical care.

The bottom line is that we simply don't know if BioViva's treatment worked on Elizabeth Parrish. They need to produce more data, on more patients, to construct even a mildly convincing scientific argument. Getting more patients may be very difficult, though: Parrish bypassed FDA regulations by traveling outside the U.S. (to Colombia) to conduct this experiment on herself.

Telomerase treatment to reverse aging is very promising, and it might really work, someday. I sincerely hope it will. For now, though, BioViva's announcement leaves me very skeptical.